For four years, my school bully called me the “Ugly Duckling” and made sure everyone else did too. Twenty years later, she knocked on my door in the middle of a storm, begging for $20. I could have slammed the door.
Instead, I handed her something that made her plead for mercy.
I learned the sound of Dorothy’s laugh before I learned the layout of my high school.
Freshman year. New building, new faces, new everything, and somehow Dorothy’s laugh cut through all of it like a knife.
I found out what it meant to be on the receiving end of that laugh pretty quickly.
“Now that one is a real ugly duckling,” she called one morning as I passed her locker. “She even waddles!”
She and her friends burst into laughter.
Other students moved away, so they weren’t walking close to me.
A week later, everyone was calling me that name. Someone even wrote it on my locker. I scrubbed at the words with a wet paper towel while passing students giggled at me.
But it didn’t end there.
A few months later, she tripped me in the cafeteria.
My tray went flying first, then me. The milk soaked into my jeans cold and fast, and for a second, I just sat there on the linoleum floor, blinking at the ceiling tiles.
“Oh, my God!” Dorothy cried out. “Are you okay?
Let me help you.”
She stood and made a show of waddling toward me. Her friends laughed first, but everyone soon joined in. She was Prom Queen, and I was just a punchline.
A teacher looked up from the faculty table, then looked away.
I gathered what was left of my dignity and retreated to the bathroom.
I told myself it was fine as I tried to clean myself up. It wasn’t fine, but I told myself that anyway.
Junior year brought the notes.
I found the folded slip of paper inside my locker. The eight words written on it hurt me deeply: No one will ever want you.
Stop trying.
I stood in the hallway and read it twice. Then I folded it back up, put it in my pocket, and didn’t show anyone.
I just stopped raising my hand in class.
After that note, it felt safer to disappear, so I did.
The last straw was the Brian incident.
Brian sat two rows over in chemistry. He was cute, kind, funny, and one of the few people who didn’t call me “Ugly Duckling.”
One afternoon, he asked if I wanted to study together for the midterm.
I floated home that day. I picked out what I was going to wear and rehearsed things I might say.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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